Plan cuts downtown one-way streets, adds protected bike lanes

Cycling advocates are pushing hard for an "active transportation" planner during a budget hearing in November, but it was not added to the $660 million budget until last week.
Mackenzie Elmer/The Register

Buy Photo

A contraflow bike lane was installed in 2013 on Fifth Avenue near the intersection with Locust Street in downtown Des Moines.(Photo: Zach Boyden-Holmes/Register file photo)Buy Photo

An ambitious new plan to make downtown Des Moines more accessible for walkers and cyclists has one goal in mind: Improve safety to encourage more street life.

Some of the changes it recommends include eliminating nearly every one-way street in favor of two-way traffic, reducing the number of driving lanes for cars and adding protected bike lanes.

All of those changes would help slow vehicle traffic and make Des Moines more pedestrian- and bike-friendly, according to Jeff Speck, an architect, urban planner and author of "Walkable City: How Downtown Can Save America, One Step at a Time."

"We think everyone wants to see and enjoy and would benefit from a livelier downtown," Speck said Thursday at a presentation of the latest Connect Downtown plan. "What's remarkable is, given how much has happened (in Des Moines), how there still isn't that much street life in the downtown.

"But there's a feeling that you're on the cusp."

Planners hope the changes, slated to be complete by 2030, will create a safer environment for pedestrians and cyclists, which in turn will encourage business growth and attract young, creative professionals who want to commute to their jobs on foot or by bike.

A draft plan shows what streets would be changed in the Connect Downtown plan. The purple lines are streets with lanes reduced, and the blue lines are streets that would be converted from one-way to two-way.(Photo: Nelson Nygaard/Special to the Register)

The draft plan, commissioned by the city of Des Moines, Urban Land Institute Iowa and the Greater Des Moines Partnership, is expected to be adopted by the City Council this fall.

Findings were presented Thursday after a yearlong case study by Speck and a team of planners from San Francisco. They will gather feedback from residents before submitting a final plan to the city.

Nearly every street in the downtown core would be touched. Its borders include University Avenue to the north, the Raccoon River to the south, Martin Luther King Jr. Parkway/19th Street to the west and East 14th Street to the east.

Existing one-way streets would be converted back to two-way traffic. Several streets, like Grand Avenue to the east and west and Second Avenue, would also have reduced travel lanes.

A connected bike network would be added downtown using protected bike lanes, and sidewalks would be widened. There would be a net gain of on-street parking.

"A street network with bike lanes is just much safer for everybody, all users, than one without," Speck said. He cited data from Prospect Park West in Brooklyn, where injury accidents dropped by 67 percent after protected bike paths were added to calm traffic.

A pilot project is in the works on East Grand Avenue in Des Moines to demonstrate what the team hopes to accomplish.

The seven-block project would remove a westbound vehicle lane and add protected bike lanes in both directions between the Des Moines River and Pennsylvania Avenue. Parallel parking, including a three-foot buffer for car doors, would be in between the vehicle lane and the bike lane, which would be next to the curb. It would be constructed with paint and bollards (plastic poles that separate the bike lane from parking).

Paul Moore, an engineer with the consulting firm Nelson Nygaard, said if all the Connect Downtown improvements are made, car traffic will experience only a slight increase in congestion during peak traffic times. It mainly would affect areas near the freeway and high-traffic intersections, he said.

The worst-case scenario is an additional three-minute commute.

"There's definitely some trade-off there," Moore said. " ... If you're driving and driving is the thing you care about, this would be the down side of the equation of making these extensive and ambitious network changes."